A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

1. There is no clear evidence that illegal immigration has a meaningful influence on wages. Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do. For the past 30 years wages haven't kept up with productivity growth, I'm sure you've seen the charts. Meanwhile expenses for housing, education and healthcare have exploded. Framing immigration as the primary cause of economic stagnation is wrong, because it is a minor influence at most. The way Trump talked about immigration was transparently racist, and it's the same Southern Strategy rhetoric we've seen time and time again.

2. Voters didn't choose Trump just because "he acknowledged issues". This election was a referendum on race, and that's what got Trump in office. See for instance https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-mak...

I'm sorry, but I have to agree to Gizmo on this one.

While outsourcing and illegal immigration are policy issues worth discussing, there were plenty of overtly racist issues that Donald Trump touched upon. There's nothing racist about "Lets shore up our border policy". Maybe even the wall isn't racist... at least, some aspects of the wall... as far as infrastructure spending, hampering the drug trade, etc. etc. We all can agree that MS-13 is crossing the border and trying to sell drugs in our country... right? That's just a fact. I don't think a lone wall helps, because MS-13 has catapults, drones, and submarines to bring the drugs over. But I'm perfectly willing to talk about the benefits of physical boarder security. A wall is just a part of the picture

However, there's something racist about calling a US Judge an unfair Mexican Hombre. Donald Trump is racist. Period. His supporters may or may not be, and his policy decisions aren't all racist. But without a doubt, Donald Trump himself is a racist who sees the world in black and white.

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As far as "not touching on rural America", there's a point about honesty. Trump HONESTLY can't do jack diddly crap about the situation. He just talked a big talk and is going to fail to deliver. He's blamed say... the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has eradicated it.

The TPP: Designed to encourage say, US Cotton Exports to Vietnam (Vietnam actually buys US Cotton to make T-Shirts and other textiles. So they were rewarded under TPP) would have improved the marketability of Rural US workers. Period.

Donald Trump destroyed the TPP however, and now China's RCEP has received major support in the region. The USA could have been the leader in Asian trade, but Donald Trump gave it up to appease his right-wind supporters. And without any US trade influence in the Asian region, our (current) Asian partners will inevitably join China's RCEP and the USA will LOSE.

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Rural America would have benefited from TPP, and China would have lost. Case in point: China wasn't even ON the TPP. A huge portion of the TPP was about securing exports for the USA (especially enticing our Asian partners to buy US material instead of Chinese material)

So yes, why don't we talk about trade and outsourcing. I am perfectly willing to have that discussion with you without resorting to calling people racist. There are plenty of actual issues to discuss here that would benefit Rural America if people figured them out.

But Donald Trump's racist talks drowns out the truth. That's a fact. He isn't helping.

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The worst part is how Donald Trump is selectively racist. He constantly beats the drum on "Radical Islam Terror", then visits Saudi Arabia FIRST. The home of Wahhabi Islam, the specific sect that raised Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attackers. Case in point: around 15 of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian.

Of course, Donald Trump gotta take care of his Saudi Arabian Hotels, so maybe that's not a surprise. Its clear Trump is in it for the money.

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_mediu...

Guess what words Donald Trump forgot about during his trip to Saudi Arabia? He never once uttered the words "Radical Islamic Terrorism".

That's the worst part of it all. I think the conservatives maybe have a point about "Radical Islamic Terror". There are certain sects of Muslims that seem to be more violent and aligned to Al Quadea, AQAP, and ISIS. They're all Wahhabism / Salifi Jihadists... a minor sect that only constitutes 0.5% of all Muslims.

But it doesn't help if the President is a opportunistic coward, who is unable to say those words when its most necessary.

I was a light browser of /b/ and /pol/ in the early run up of the election and watched how they basically took the joke idea of Trump and ran with it because so many people were incredulous.

When Trump started gaining some steam it leaped over to reddit and took on it's own life, but from what I saw on /b/ it was just about "rustling jimmies" of anyone who would respond and ramping that up because of the chaos it would cause.

I suppose that it's possible that some kind of right wing hate machine took over, but more than likely it's just an amplification of the past. Those clowns posted and discussed nazi/gore/anti-feminist/boxxy crap since literally forever.

I'm definitely not arguing that no one voted for him. But I do think we keep seeing examples of structural manipulations of the system to alter vote outcomes. Republicans haven't been particularly subtle about this.

And actually, my dude, there are a ton of people studying this and the altright is by no means Trump's largest individual support block. There's quite large and very thoughtful investigations with raw data available.

Again, I repeat: if you actually crunch the numbers the altright is not only a minority of Trump's supporters, but a faction that's almost vanishingly small. This sort of shows up in practical measurements of their gatherings.

Now, unopposed I think they'll grow. That's what fascism is all about at this stage and really their principle message is that they want power and they'll fix white people problems by any means necessary.

But they weren't particularly effective this last election cycle compared to the more direct manipulations we see.

I've never really understood gamergate. I vaguely recall there were some accusations of favouritism by games journalists towards some female game makers. What I don't understand is how this spiralled out of control. Was it mostly fueled by people jumping on a bandwagon or is there something I'm missing?